Trending Tags

The importance of security within Blockchain

Cybercriminals are increasing their methodologies to steal valuable / sensitive information, such as financial data, health records, personal identification information and intellectual property. They are also turning to other highly profitable strategies, such as DDoS attacks, or maintaining a data rescue using encryption techniques.

Blockchain has the potential to greatly improve everything from the integrity of data and digital identities to the enabling of more secure IoT devices to avoid DDoS attacks. Blockchain can even play through the ‘triad of the CIA’ of confidentiality, integrity and availability, offering a greater capacity for recovery, encryption, auditing and transparency.

A chain of blocks, as implied, is a chain of digital “blocks” that contain transaction records. Each block is connected to all the blocks before and after it. This makes it difficult to alter a single record because a hacker would have to change the block containing that record, as well as those linked to it to avoid detection. This alone may not seem like a great deterrent, but blockchain has other inherent characteristics that provide additional means of security.

To help frustrate those ambitious hackers, blockchains are decentralized and defined through peer-to-peer networks that are continually updated to ensure they stay in sync with each other. Because they are not within a central location, the exploitability factor of the single point of failure is exceeded, since it would require large amounts of computing power to access each instance of a given blockchain transaction and alter each one at the same time. There is some debate about whether this means that smaller blockchain networks could be susceptible to attack, however, the general consensus is that the larger the network, the more resistant it will be to exploitation.